The
Syntagm Engine is an attempt to solve the following problem: How
does one combine a performative
practice of non-idiomatic free improvisation with an aesthetic
of critical sound collage (critical in the sense of detournement,
the removal of a piece of culture from its original context and its
placement in a new context with the purpose of commenting on or
critiquing that material or its origins)?

The
answer so far (for me): a relational database of sounds categorized
by several variables (like intensity, "rhythmicness",
"semiotic density", etc.) which can be easily queried to
present source material that is connected. Hence a wide variety of
material is available to be juxtaposed and organized via many
possible relationships, though the relationships are chosen
dynamically by the player.

The
name of this new instrument derives from the field of semiotics, in
which a syntagm is defined to
be a sequence of signs.
A traditional example of a syntagm is a sentence, such as "man
bites dog." Of course the words, or signs, in this sentence can
be rearranged to form a new syntagm with a different meaning, like
"dog bites man." Similarly, the Syntagm Engine is a tool
for quickly forming sequences of sonic signs.

The
Syntagm Engine consists of about 7000 lines of Perl, SQL, and Csound
code which run on a Linux laptop. I first performed with it in May
2000 at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and though it
has been used in about a dozen shows since then, it is still
considered to be software in development.